Don't Wear High Heels On A Soggy Lawn

When the inimitable Dolly Parton gave the above-mentioned advice, she was no doubt on tour in San Francisco. I don’t have any pictures from the Mountain View show because I was busy stumbling after the baby while wearing- you guessed it- high heels on a soggy lawn. Or more like a slippery backstage deck area. But there is something gorgeous about rock in a rainstorm. Seen from backstage, the rain catches the stage lights and intermingles with the smoke amidst an amphitheater full of undaunted fans in ponchos and it feels like something extraordinary. Which it always is, really, but sometimes it’s easy to forget how lucky I am to regularly witness the transformative potential of live music. My friend Gina (wife of Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz) once told me that she always feels fortunate to live in rock-wife liminality- not exactly an audience member but not a performer either. My friend Danica was in the audience and now has a massive crush on Rivers, which probably would have happened anyway, but I think there was a little extra magic in that rain.

The guys still have the San Diego and Irvine shows left to do, but writing this from my desk at home, I feel like the hard part is over. And the hard part got pretty hard for a minute there. I skipped the Seattle show due to a raging migraine and schlepped all of our stuff through the airport the next day wearing sunglasses and barfing in trash cans (which, I suppose, is about as rock as it gets). The worst part was that I missed seeing our friends, but you can read about the show (and more about Ethiopian adoption, if you’re interested) on my friend Karin’s blog.

Things soon looked up, though. Our hotel room in SF was awesome, to the point that upon entering I felt it was necessary to grab Tariku and jump on the bed for a few minutes while laughing diabolically. Tariku ran laps around the Yerba Buena Gardens all evening while I tried in vain to convince him to go see the vogueing competition at the neighboring Center for the Arts. He was totally uninterested in the men walking by in glittery drag, preferring the eternally captivating delights of shuffling through dry leaves.

The next day I met up with my SF gal pals, one of whom happens to be the manager of exquisite corset shop Dark Garden. I used my iphone to bribe Tariku into compliance while Andrea fitted me with a gorgeous corset, coming soon to a Halloween celebration near you…